“There are different reasons [children] arrive unaccompanied,” according to Delphine Moralis, secretary general of Missing Children Europe.

“Some of them have been sent by their parents hoping that their child would have a better chance at life, some of these children have been separated from their parents by smugglers as a way of controlling them, and some would have lost their parents in the chaos.”

But the profile of these unaccompanied children is changing. More girls are arriving in Europe on their own, and the age of the children going missing is getting lower. Last year, for the first time, children as young as four went missing.

So what’s happened to all these missing children? To put it simply, no-one really knows. That’s because when a child from Syria, Afghanistan or Eritrea goes missing in Greece or Italy, nothing much happens. Few border agencies file a missing person’s report.

There are concerns now that smugglers are turning the children they bring into Europe into the hands of traffickers to make more money. Those children might then be pushed into prostitution or slavery.

“Smugglers are exploiting the children that they bring into Europe,” said Delphine Moralis. “The problem is that these children often turn to the people who got them into Europe, rather than to the authorities and that makes them vulnerable.”

Gulwali Passarlay left Afghanistan aged 12, and it took him over a year to make it to Britain. He was separated from his brother almost immediately by the smugglers, so had to make the gruelling journey on his own.

He walked for days, hid in the back of lorries, jumped out of moving trains, and spent two weeks in an adult prison in Turkey before finally arriving on the Turkish coast. There, he was taken to a boat big enough for 20 people. There were 120 of them inside.

“The boat broke down,” he said. “This was the first time I’d seen the sea. I was terrified. I said to God, ‘I don’t want to die here. Not here in the Mediterranean. My Mum will never know whether I’m dead or alive’.”

Minutes before the boat sank, the coastguard found them and took them to Greece. Gulwali was handed over to the police, then the army. His fingerprints were taken and then he was given the devastating news: he’d have to leave within a month or be deported.

By then he had found out his brother was in Britain, and so he did what thousands of other children have done. He left the refugee camp in Greece and disappeared.

“We’d walk through the railway lines so the police wouldn’t see us,” he said. “We kept a very low profile.” Other children he knew went further to avoid being caught. They burnt their fingertips or cut them off entirely so that if they were found, they couldn’t be identified and sent back home.

Eventually Gulwali made it to Calais where he made dozens of attempts to get to Britain. One day he got lucky: he crept into a lorry carrying bananas and made it into the UK.

It took Gulwali five years to get refugee status. He started school, went to university and, last year, wrote a book about his journey, The Lightless Sky.

But for every one who makes it, there are thousands who never get to this point. Like Gulwali, they feel safer disappearing than going through Europe’s asylum system.

“There are a number of EU agencies in hot spot areas in Italy and Greece that are supposed to identify asylum seekers, but they’re turning into detention centres,” she said. “When unaccompanied minors fester in camps, they’re not going to tolerate that forever.” And it’s not only in Greece or Italy that children are struggling to enter the asylum system.

Ciara Smyth says there’s evidence that some European countries actively discourage children from applying for asylum because they want them to move on somewhere else.

“Many countries along the transit route to northern Europe adopt a ‘wave through’ approach where they’re turning a blind eye to unaccompanied minors,” she said. “They’re not registering them. They’re effectively encouraging them to keep going.”

And they keep going because, like Gulwani, they’re often looking for family members. And here, too, there’s a gap between what should happen and what is happening.

Under the so-called Dublin regulation, when a child is first registered in a country, the authorities there should find out whether they have family in another EU state. If they do, the child should be sent there to have their asylum claim processed. But that rarely happens.

When children do eventually arrive in a country where they want to claim asylum, a representative should be appointed to support them through the asylum process. But according to Ciara Smyth, while some countries have good guardian services, in others, there are none.

Remember, these children are often completely on their own. And when their asylum claims are being processed, they often have to undergo humiliating physical tests – teeth X-rays, head measurements or bone density exams to check they’re not lying about their age. Then they have to explain why they left home. They’ll be interviewed repeatedly and asked to recount, in intricate detail, the traumas they’ve escaped from.

“Very often unaccompanied minors might not have a very clear recollection of events,” she says. “It’s very difficult for them to give a linear narrative. Successful asylum claims are all about being able to present a coherent story.”

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At that point, more children disappear. So why isn’t more being done to support these vulnerable children?

Last year, almost 90,000 unaccompanied children arrived in Europe. That’s a huge number. Clearly, even if every EU state devoted more attention and resources to the problem, child migrants and refugees would continue to slip through the net. Looking after children who are already within the asylum system has placed a huge strain on local authorities, at a time when budgets are already under pressure.

But according to Ciara Smyth, the EU is failing to adhere to the very policies it created to protect children. And it seems that the public, too, are turning a blind eye.

Britain, Germany and Canada all said they would accept more refugees and European leaders agreed to share responsibility for refugees arriving in Greece and Italy.

One year on and many of those promises have been broken. Yet there’s been little public outcry. Why?

It’s partly about economics. As austerity bites across Europe, people feel less inclined to help outsiders. And the alleged connection between migrants and militants hasn’t helped. Without popular support, politicians are less inclined to take action and enforce the rules that exist to protect children.

So the story of the 10,000 missing children tells a much broader one about failure: the failure of border authorities to follow laws which exist to protect children and the failure of Europeans – moved by that photograph of Alan Kurdi – to continue to care for long enough to persuade political leaders to keep the promises they made.

A network of 30 European NGOs supporting missing and exploited children have come together to tackle the rising problem of missing refugee children.

“Human smugglers increasingly combine smuggling with exploitation and their victims are often children,” says Federica Toscano. “At chaotic border situations, it happens that smugglers deliberately separate refugee children from their parents to exploit them.’’

“We also hear that families at the border between Greece and Macedonia have been forced to ‘pay’ smugglers with one of their children,” continues Toscano. “Smugglers have come to realise they can make much more profit by taking advantage of vulnerable people. And the most vulnerable people are children.”

Toscano is well-placed to know. She works for Missing Children Europe, a network of thirty European NGOs that are active in the field of missing and sexually exploited children. Since its foundation in 2001, MCE has focussed on different groups of missing children (pdf). Half of the cases of children that disappear in Europe are runaways: those who run away from home or institutions after a history of violence or abuse. More than a third are abducted by parents.

But the most recent category is unaccompanied child refugees. “This group only makes up 2% of cases, which is a low percentage,” says Delphine Moralis, the secretary general of MCE, “but that doesn’t say anything about the magnitude of the problem. These children are seldom reported as missing. That’s why we find it so important to focus on this problem too.’’

Earlier this year Europol stated that at least 10,000 unaccompanied child refugees have gone missing in Europe. A recent EU report warned that these children have become targets for criminal gangs, who exploit them in the sex industry or force them to beg, steal or smuggle drugs.

But MCE believe the true number to be far higher than 10,000. Toscano says that “in Italy alone 5,000 refugee children have gone missing. And Germany reported that in 2015 almost 6,000 of these children have disappeared.’’

The organisation has been aware of the problem for some time. “As far back as 2005 a Belgian study showed that one fourth of unaccompanied children seeking asylum went missing within the first 48 hours upon arrival. So it’s no news to us.”

But for a whole range of reasons, many of these disappearances go unreported. “First of all, there’s no sense of urgency,” explains Toscano. “When a child refugee goes missing, the general assumption is that he or she has a plan, and that the child is resilient. The police and social services don’t feel the same sense of urgency as when the child is from their own country. They are not aware of the risks these children run, that they might fall victim to exploitation. So nothing is really done.’’

The lack of formal procedures when these children disappear is another problem. “Much depends on the goodwill of the single professional involved,” says Toscano. “There is no common system to collect information about missing children in Europe. There are good practices, but they’re very local. So the traffickers just go to another area.’’

MCE was founded fifteen years ago in 2001, when it became clear that European cooperation on this issue was seriously lacking. “I was working for a Belgian NGO at the time when two Belgian girls went missing,” says Moralis. “On the third day of their disappearance a judge called us and said: ‘We have no idea where these children are, they could be anywhere in Europe, we really need your help now.’ There was no other way to tackle the problem but by contacting one by one all the 309 European organisations working in this field. That’s when we realised it was necessary to create a network of contact points for missing children.”

The organisation facilitates training of professionals to respond better to the disappearance of child refugees. It also exerts pressure on European institutions to provide clear rules and legislation to protect these children. This year, MCE has published a handbook (pdf) on good practises to help prevent and respond to unaccompanied children going missing.

“We try to be as practical as possible,” says Toscano. “You can do so much to prevent a child from disappearing. Just a simple example: when a child arrives in a shelter and is given food, he may think he has to pay for it. When he has no money, he will try to escape as soon as possible. Workers should take time to explain everything to the child … Sometimes these children don’t even realise it when they are exploited. Their traffickers tell them all kinds of lies to make them extra vulnerable. They say: watch out for authorities, they will lock you up.’’

They also closely monitor development throughout Europe. Toscano has been collecting information on missing children in Europe through the EU co-funded SUMMIT project (pdf). This included a study into interagency cooperation around unaccompanied migrant children done through surveys and interviews with hotlines for missing children, professionals at refugee reception centres, guardians and law enforcement in the UK, Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Spain, Belgium and Ireland.

As a result they are hearing from the frontlines. “We know that there are networks of child traffickers that operate in different countries,” says Toscano. “For example, when a refugee child has been exploited in Eritrea and claims asylum in the Netherlands, there will be another criminal gang waiting to exploit him there. Traffickers have excellent lines of communication. When a child has a history of trafficking, the risk that he will be trafficked again is very high.”

According to Moralis, the closing of borders means that lots of refugees are stuck in bad conditions: “This makes them more vulnerable and creates more opportunities for criminals. How is it possible that all this is going on in Europe and nobody seems to know where these children are?”

“Our main aim is to raise awareness that these children are children,” says Toscano. “It’s very simple. You’d think that everyone would be aware of this, but it is certainly not the case. Not for authorities, not for members of the civil society, nor for the general public. These children usually aren’t seen as children, but as people who just come here and use resources that we want to use for something else.’’

Findings from an in-depth study on the issue of the disappearance of unaccompanied migrant children were developed in the framework of the project “Safeguarding Unaccompanied Migrant Minors from going Missing by Identifying Best Practices and Training Actors on Interagency Cooperation” (SUMMIT). The report reflects insight from the actors who deal primarily with the reception of unaccompanied children and those who focus on the disappearance of children. It examines practices in seven EU countries – the UK, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Cyprus, Ireland and Greece.

It serves as a necessary mapping exercise of good practices, along with a manual for grassroots professionals to be published in the next weeks, to promote discussions and expert trainings between these actors across Member States.

In the study, the authors call for improved cooperation between law enforcement, social workers in shelters and reception centres, guardians, hotlines for missing children and other parties to better prevent and respond to the disappearance of unaccompanied children.